10 ms·

I view regulations like rules in sports. Good rules don't diminish the players efforts, they channel them away from maladaptive avenues into productive ones.

by badsock 12y ago

I view regulations like rules in sports. Good rules don't diminish the players efforts, they channel them away from maladaptive avenues into productive ones. Forgive the extreme metaphor, but if you were suddenly allowed to uses weapons in a hockey game, certainly there would be a flurry of activity as new weapons and armourments are developed, and whoever built those products would benefit. But it would be a disaster for the players, and ultimately for the sport. The Internet infrastructure relies heavily on cooperation, and what Comcast did to Netflix was essentially weaponizing that cooperation. We don't need to wait and see where this goes, because history is overflowing with examples of that tactic being toxic for the broader ecosystem. The Comcast/Netflix play was a success, and we know that a game where those kinds of plays succeed is a bad game, so they changed the rules. This is why you're not allowed to cross check in hockey - sure, it's competition (and competition is what sport is about), but that particular kind of competition leads down a bad road for everyone. So to me, this ruling says "compete, innovate, but not in this space: this space is destructive". It doesn't address what I see as an equally large problem - lack of competition at the last mile - but that's for another ruling.

bhauer 12y ago
I would agree that some regulation is fine. I would have preferred specifically-crafted legislation for the modern Internet, and not application of a "forbeared" Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. And I too think the last mile problem is at least as interesting—I feel it's even more important. My preference would be for something very light-touch at first since in my opinion we haven't seen much evidence of the weaponizing escalation you've illustrated in metaphor. We've seen Comcact and Netflix bring knives to what was expected to be a boxing match. In my opinion, the outcome was fine. Without the metaphor: the market worked it out. Given Comcast was in the middle, I assume many Comcast customers gave them a verbal lashing and some others actually voted with their wallet and switched to whatever the second option was for them (assuming they had a second option; see last mile problem). A few people may have even decided to stream video not from Netflix but rather Amazon Prime or other services. Given Netflix's massive bandwidth needs, the metaphor is a bit more like Netflix's whole boxing team showed up to the boxing match, so Comcast's single boxer reached into his pocket and grabbed his knife. Then the Netflix team grabbed their knives (by way of drumming up the ire of their user community). And there was a bunch of blood spilled. But ultimately, I think this process is acceptable. Going back a few messages, we had been talking about what can be taken away from hardware manufacturers expressing concern about this regulatory change. You had said of course they are concerned, for it is natural for them to worry that their next-generation hardware for a tiered-Internet is at risk of lower demand. My premise is that implementing a tiered-Internet (whatever that is) is not much of an engineering challenge at this point. I expect ongoing R&D for network hardware has been and continues to be principally about how do we make this stuff faster, cheaper, better because our customers (ISPs and backbone providers) always want faster, cheaper, better. Now they are presumably worried their customers won't want faster, cheaper, better. That gives me some concern. My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present. But will it be only a little bit better? Maybe even pretty much just the same? Maybe I will be totally satisfied; I cannot predict the future. But are these hardware vendors the canary in the coalmine? Or are they shills for Comcast and the other evil ISPs? I'm not sure, but they are definitely an integral part of making the Internet work so their opinion should not be so broadly rejected.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > I would agree that some regulation is fine. I would have preferred specifically-crafted legislation for the modern Internet, and not application of a "forbeared" Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Why does the legislation as opposed to the regulation need to be specially crafted to the modern internet, especially if the existing provisions of Title II, including the regulatory flexibility provisions, provide an adequate basis regulation specially crafted to the modern internet?
- badsock 12y ago
  Right, so I agree that the engineering challenges aren't very great, but I would argue that little of the current infrastructure was designed with the ability to de-prioritize packets based on their origin, and so there'd be a pretty massive replacement of hardware in order. I'd also argue the above as a more realistic attribution of motivation than that they're worried people will just want less Internet. I don't think the hardware companies are shills, or that they're evil, I just think they're myopically focused on their next product cycle. The point you raise about the size disparity between Netflix and Comcast is precient, but I see it from the other direction - what would Comcast and their partners start doing to market entrants with this kind of strategy? If I'm Google and I've got a comfortable relationship with Comcast, what's to stop me from asking them, as part of a larger deal, to severely degrade or outright block new entrants that might threaten me? We've seen lots of companies do this (Microsoft and the various computer manufacturers (Compaq et al.) in the 90's comes immediately to mind). The trouble with this scenario is that it takes a long time to notice anything is wrong, and so you don't get much market pushback. Then 10 years go by and you realize that no one's challenged the incumbents in a long time, and it's not because they're any good at what they do. > My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present. I don't think that's safe to say at all, considering it's been flatlined for so long: http://blog.nprg.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Google-Fiber-Three-components.png http://blog.nprg.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Google-Fiber... Which is why I don't think the light-touch approach is warranted in general anymore. There's clearly big structural problems here. Having said that, I think we'd agree that the above chart is mostly a last-mile issue. The NN thing is more future-oriented, which is riskier, but also hopefully avoids a situation like the last mile issue where things are so entrenched that it's hard to imagine fixing it.

by badsock 12y ago

bhauer 12y ago

I would agree that some regulation is fine. I would have preferred specifically-crafted legislation for the modern Internet, and not application of a "forbeared" Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. And I too think the last mile problem is at least as interesting—I feel it's even more important. My preference would be for something very light-touch at first since in my opinion we haven't seen much evidence of the weaponizing escalation you've illustrated in metaphor. We've seen Comcact and Netflix bring knives to what was expected to be a boxing match. In my opinion, the outcome was fine. Without the metaphor: the market worked it out. Given Comcast was in the middle, I assume many Comcast customers gave them a verbal lashing and some others actually voted with their wallet and switched to whatever the second option was for them (assuming they had a second option; see last mile problem). A few people may have even decided to stream video not from Netflix but rather Amazon Prime or other services. Given Netflix's massive bandwidth needs, the metaphor is a bit more like Netflix's whole boxing team showed up to the boxing match, so Comcast's single boxer reached into his pocket and grabbed his knife. Then the Netflix team grabbed their knives (by way of drumming up the ire of their user community). And there was a bunch of blood spilled. But ultimately, I think this process is acceptable. Going back a few messages, we had been talking about what can be taken away from hardware manufacturers expressing concern about this regulatory change. You had said of course they are concerned, for it is natural for them to worry that their next-generation hardware for a tiered-Internet is at risk of lower demand. My premise is that implementing a tiered-Internet (whatever that is) is not much of an engineering challenge at this point. I expect ongoing R&D for network hardware has been and continues to be principally about how do we make this stuff faster, cheaper, better because our customers (ISPs and backbone providers) always want faster, cheaper, better. Now they are presumably worried their customers won't want faster, cheaper, better. That gives me some concern. My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present. But will it be only a little bit better? Maybe even pretty much just the same? Maybe I will be totally satisfied; I cannot predict the future. But are these hardware vendors the canary in the coalmine? Or are they shills for Comcast and the other evil ISPs? I'm not sure, but they are definitely an integral part of making the Internet work so their opinion should not be so broadly rejected.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> I would agree that some regulation is fine. I would have preferred specifically-crafted legislation for the modern Internet, and not application of a "forbeared" Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Why does the legislation as opposed to the regulation need to be specially crafted to the modern internet, especially if the existing provisions of Title II, including the regulatory flexibility provisions, provide an adequate basis regulation specially crafted to the modern internet?
badsock 12y ago
Right, so I agree that the engineering challenges aren't very great, but I would argue that little of the current infrastructure was designed with the ability to de-prioritize packets based on their origin, and so there'd be a pretty massive replacement of hardware in order. I'd also argue the above as a more realistic attribution of motivation than that they're worried people will just want less Internet. I don't think the hardware companies are shills, or that they're evil, I just think they're myopically focused on their next product cycle. The point you raise about the size disparity between Netflix and Comcast is precient, but I see it from the other direction - what would Comcast and their partners start doing to market entrants with this kind of strategy? If I'm Google and I've got a comfortable relationship with Comcast, what's to stop me from asking them, as part of a larger deal, to severely degrade or outright block new entrants that might threaten me? We've seen lots of companies do this (Microsoft and the various computer manufacturers (Compaq et al.) in the 90's comes immediately to mind). The trouble with this scenario is that it takes a long time to notice anything is wrong, and so you don't get much market pushback. Then 10 years go by and you realize that no one's challenged the incumbents in a long time, and it's not because they're any good at what they do. > My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present. I don't think that's safe to say at all, considering it's been flatlined for so long: http://blog.nprg.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Google-Fiber-Three-components.png http://blog.nprg.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Google-Fiber... Which is why I don't think the light-touch approach is warranted in general anymore. There's clearly big structural problems here. Having said that, I think we'd agree that the above chart is mostly a last-mile issue. The NN thing is more future-oriented, which is riskier, but also hopefully avoids a situation like the last mile issue where things are so entrenched that it's hard to imagine fixing it.